In general, glass-making involves the combination of precursive materials for melting and reacting together to form a desired glass composition. The volume and use of glass is such that natural resources are traditionally favored with a cost-optimal amount of beneficiation of such materials for glass-production purposes.
Some of the historical glass-making schemes involved the combining of sand (as a silica source), lime (as a calcium source) and soda ash (as a sodium source) along with other materials and processing to form the ubiquitous glass products. Such processes traditionally suffered from, and continue to suffer from, production limitations. Among the more critical limitations are batch-free time (the time required to completely dissolve the combined materials) and the fining time (the time to remove gases from the melt which form undesired bubbles in the melt and resulting glass). Other limitations involve the handling problems associated with the precursive materials, such as crumbling, dusting, clumping, sintering deficiencies and the like.
Progress has been made in the glass-making processes by the use of specially processed or beneficiated materials intended for use as glass precursive materials. In particular, a class of synthetic silicates have been developed encompassing various forms of synthetic calcium silicates, magnesium silicates and/or calcium magnesium silicates. Exemplary of such materials are SYNSIL.TM. synthetic silicates. While such synthetic silicates can provide beneficial results, there continues to be a need for enhanced precursive materials for the glass-making technologies.